Radiohead’s In Rainbows has been nominated for “Album of the Year” in the year’s Grammy Awards.
Here’s who they are up against:
Coldplay – Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends
Lil Wayne – Tha Carter III
Ne-Yo – Year Of The Gentleman
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss – Raising Sand
Radiohead – In Rainbows
In addition to “Album of the Year”, they were also nominated in the following categories:
Best Rock Performance By A Duo Or Group With Vocals (House of Cards)
Best Rock Song (House of Cards)
Best Alternative Music Album (In Rainbows)
Best Boxed Or Special Limited Edition Package (In Rainbows)
Producer Of The Year, Non-Classical (Nigel Godrich)
Best Short Form Music Video (House of Cards)
There has undoubtedly been a great number of awesome videos that have come out of the “House of Cards” animation data that was released last month. Let’s add this one to the list, shall we?
Ian Mackinnon created an amazing video using the 3D data to do a time-lapse interpretation of “House of Cards” using LEGO bricks. Enjoy it below…
Yes, we know it’s been out since earlier this week but we’ve been on vacation so cut us some slack.
For those that haven’t noticed, the video that used lasers instead of cameras to make has finally been released. We’ve been talking about it for months and the hype has certainly held up to the amazing-ness of the final product. What makes this video really interesteding is that you can download the raw 3D data and do pretty much whatever you want to with it. The animation data used to make the video are licensed to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license at Google Code. This means you are free to use the data to make your own video projects, as long as you abide by the CC license?s conditions. (To be clear, the song and its accompanying video are not under CC license; the data used to make the video are.)
An interview with director James Frost can be read at Creativity Magazine. Here’s an excerpt:
Creativity: How did you come to the idea of using this sort of imaging? JF: About a year and a half ago I came across Flight Patterns, a piece of work done by Aaron Koblin—he’s basically a data visualizer. I’m kind of frightened by flying, I’m always obsessed by things that have planes and stuff, so I emailed him and said that I thought it was a really beautiful piece of work. He responded and we had lunch. At the time he had just left UCLA Media Lab, and he was going through all the stuff they were researching and developing. One of the things he had mentioned was they were working on real time 3D laser scanning. I immediately said Well, hang on a minute, what’s all that about? I wanted to get to the crux of it — is it really real time? He said that at that point they were pretty close to having it.
So, basically, I wrote up an idea. I’d known Radiohead’s managers for a while, and figured that they’d probably be the only band that would take that kind of a risk, so I sent it to them in November or December and they showed it to Thom.Thom is obviously very intelligent and keeps up with technological advances, and he came back and said he wanted to know more about it. At that point he sent me an email saying what was in his head before the video. There were two things he had very strong feelings about– one was vaporization and the other was a party scene. We went back and forth over email to try and decipher some sort of linear narrative to convey everything. I happened to be in England in April, so I went up to Oxford, met with him and talked for a couple of hours about stuff and then went, Let’s try it and see what happens.
Pitchfork has an update on the upcoming “House of Cards” video which we reported about a couple of times before. It was apparently supposed to be released today but has been pushed back. Bummer.
In case you’re just learning of it, the video was shot without any cameras. Instead, a whole bunch of lasers were used.
The Geometric Informatics scanning system employs structured light to capture detailed 3D images at close proximity, and was used to render the performances of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, the female lead, and several partygoers. The Velodyne Lidar system uses multiple lasers to capture large environments in 3D, in this case 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute, capturing all of the exterior scenes and wide party shots.
In addition, Pitchfork also reports that “Radiohead will be sharing data used in the creation of their new video with fans, so that fans can do their own crazy, rave-y things with it. And good news for folks who think Velodyne Lidar sounds like a character in a fantasy novel: a documentary will soon surface showing just how all this fancy stuff was done.”
Six images have appeared on Dead Air Space today and yesterday with what we assume are stills of the upcoming “House of Cards” video. The video should be out very soon, according to Thom. As reported earlier, Radiohead apparently filmed the video on a closed sound stage at the media-oriented G-STAR School near West Palm Beach, FL and will feature 3D lasers and the band in a “party scene” with actress Lauren Maher as Thom’s love interest.
We reached out to a spokesperson at G-STAR a few weeks ago and received this response:
“Out of respect to the production, I am not at liberty to discuss this matter at THIS time.”
The whole thing sounds pretty crazy, and we’re especially interested in this party scene which is referenced. If you look at the photos on Dead Air Space, some of the photos are titled “party.” The lyric “Throw your keys in the bowl, kiss your husband goodnight” from the song is rumored to reference swinging parties where couples arrive at the host’s house and put their car keys in a bowl. The woman then chooses a key from the bowl and then goes home with the guy who owns them. This apparently happened quite a bit in the 70s and is referred to as a “key party.”
We’re probably looking way too deep in to this. Anyway, expect the new video soon!
